From courses to category pages, you can use custom sidebars to tailor your pages further to your readers interests. Have you been using your site’s sidebar to its fullest potential?

Any good WordPress theme allows you to create a sidebar by simply dragging Widgets into a predefined space from your admin panel. This sidebar is then used on every page that has it enabled throughout your site.

With such massive visibility, you ought to fill the content of your sidebar the most relevant and important pages and offerings you can. But is this always the best way?

See, rather than creating complex layouts to show different kinds of content across pages, all that really may be needed is a way to switch out sidebars when you need to. That way you can simply support the main content of the page with a tailored sidebar.

Imagine these scenarios:

Scenario #1: Think of creating a custom sidebar that shows on all posts in a category called “Food Recipes” and filling it with Widgets that link to your recommended cooking products (with affiliate links of course).

Scenario #2: Or think, if you have a course on your website and each page has a sidebar that links to other sections of the course.

Don’t you think using a tailored sidebar versus your generic blog sidebar in those scenarios will vastly improve the usefulness of those pages?

I think so, and I brought this power to life by building MD Simple Sidebars for you.

Here’s how it works:

1) Create and Manage Sidebars From the Widgets Admin Panel

Many 3rd-party sidebars plugins add bulky interfaces to create custom sidebars, amongst tons of other stuff. In many cases these features are an overkill, and who wants to jump from page to page to manage sidebars?

MD Simple Sidebars makes managing custom sidebars simple and adds a small “Edit Sidebars” button to the top of the Widgets admin panel.

By clicking this button, the Sidebars Manager slides down so you can easily create new sidebars. To make this interface even more useful, you can assign your custom sidebars across different post types in just a few clicks.

Neat, simple, compact, right from your Widgets admin panel.

2) Set Sidebars Across Categories

While it’s useful to set sidebars across post types from the Sidebars Manager, you may be wondering if you can do the same on categories.

My answer to you is: of course!

Simply edit any category from the Posts admin panel to assign a sidebar to the category page itself. For even more power, you can set a custom sidebar on all posts in the category from this page as well.

Think of the power! You can make your category pages far more useful by creating a sidebar for each category as well as automatically swap out sidebars for all posts in the category!

The content you put into those sidebars is up to you, but rest assured that once you put the system into place, MD will take care of the heavy lifting from there.

3) Use MD Widgets and Helper Classes to Build Content-Heavy Sidebars

Marketers Delight comes with four valuable widgets out-of-the-box that you can use to create beautiful sidebars. Those widgets include:

Content Spotlight

Easy Email Form

Text + Image Widget

Quotes Widget

On top of the default WordPress widgets, and the vast amount of free plugins out there, you can build your custom sidebars any way you want to.

Even better, you can pair the WordPress Text widget with MD Helper Classes to build custom widgets right from your admin panel. It’s remarkable how a system like MD Simple Sidebars opens up your site for truly tailored content pages.

Bonus: Activate Other Custom Post Types With This Simple Filter

By default, MD Simple Sidebars accounts for Posts and Pages in WordPress.

However, you may want to extend this power to your custom post types once you start installing plugins and building up your site.

Because of my goal to keep Marketers Delight as flexible as possible, you can open up your custom post types to custom sidebars through a simple filter in the MD Child Theme.

All that you need to make this filter work is to grab the custom post type ID from your admin panel.

Let me show you the filter works in full:

Step 1: Get the Post Type ID

In this example, I’m using my favorite eCommerce plugin Easy Digital Downloads. From my admin panel, I go to the “Downloads” tab the plugin adds and once there, I look at the URL to find the ID.

In this case my custom post type ID is download.

Step 2: Add Filter to child theme functions.php file

Now that I have my post type ID, I can simply plug it into the md_filter_sidebars_post_types filter in my child theme’s functions.php file like so:

Tip: for quicker reference in the future, you can grab this snippet from the Snippets library.

You’ll notice the post type ID is set as an array and inside are 2 keys: archive and single. Based on whether your custom post type has an archive page (think of your blog posts homepage vs. Pages) you can choose whether or not you’ll need both select fields in the Sidebars manager.

In the case of EDD, the plugin creates a listing to show all of my downloads and creates single post entries, so I activated the filter to target both scenarios.

Step 3: Save Filter, Upload Child Theme, and Set Your Custom Sidebars

Once you add the filter to your child theme, save and upload it, you can begin adding sidebars to custom post types!

What did this filter accomplish? Go check out the Sidebars Manager:

As you can see, you can now control the sidebar on your custom post types right from the slick new MD Sidebars Manager.

Ready to update to MD4.6.2?

Go to Appearance in your WordPress admin to get the new update.Before updating, make sure your site is on the latest version of WordPress. You must have an active license key to get MD updates!

Get the most out of your pages and categories with perfectly tailored sidebars. Here's how it works:

1

Create and Manage Sidebars From the Widgets Panel

MD Simple Sidebars neatly places the Sidebars Manager at the top of your Widgets panel where you can add and delete custom sidebars with ease.

2

Set Custom Sidebars Across Different Post Types

Say you wanted your blog posts page to use a custom sidebar, and every blog post to use a different sidebar. This, and other post types, are a click away in the Sidebars Manager.

3

Set Custom Sidebars Across Different Categories

Not only can you assign a custom sidebar to every category page, but you can assign a sidebar to posts based on the category!

4

Set Custom Sidebars on a Page-by-Page Basis

While it's nice to set custom sidebars across posts and categories, you can override any individual page right from the Edit screen.

5

Build Truly Custom Sidebars With MD Helper Classes + Widgets

You'd be amazed at what you can create from just a simple text widget and some MD Helper Classes. By using MD Widgets (easy email forms, content spotlight + more), creating truly custom sidebars is a a drag away.